


A Matter of Keeping

by forthegreatergood



Series: A Matter of Asking [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anal Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Getting Back Together, M/M, Porn With Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 02:27:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3232841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint finds out Phil lived.</p><hr/><p>Not strictly Agents of SHIELD compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Marvel.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Clint stared at the file before reading it again. He couldn't remember if it was the fifteenth or twentieth time. He'd lost count after the seventh. He did know that it was at least three hours since he'd flipped it open. At least three hours since he’d rolled his eyes at Tony, of all people, for printing something out in "dead-tree format" and telling him it was "for his eyes only." He'd understood roughly thirty seconds after he'd started reading. This wasn't something Tony wanted leaving data-crumbs all over someone's server and someone else's hard drive. Clint was simultaneously hungry and too nervous to even think of food. Natasha knew. He was sure Natasha knew. Natasha had probably told Tony to tell him, or Tony had asked her if he could tell him. Or maybe Natasha had even pointed Tony in the right direction, wound him up, and let him go. She'd been damn cagey since....

He rubbed his face and swallowed. She'd been damn cagey since Phil had died. Since he'd gotten Phil killed. Except that he hadn't. He flipped to the tenth page of the file, where half the text was Coulson's dutiful requests, made every thirty days, that the current Avengers roster be cleared to know that he'd survived. The other half of the text was made up of canned refusals. After the eighth or ninth time, Clint had looked up the procedures. An agent could request a review of intel's clearance level requirements once a month. Phil had been doing so like clockwork since he'd been reactivated. Fury had been denying the requests, also like clockwork. Clint cracked his neck.

Fury or Hill, he amended silently. But this didn't feel like Hill. Hill would have made it clear after the first request that it wasn't happening until her schedule said it was happening, and that she didn't appreciate the extra paperwork. Phil wouldn't have kept pushing. Clint knew he could be a stubborn bastard when he wanted to be, but he usually picked his battles, and Hill wasn't someone to antagonize. Then again, the mission reports for half the ops his new team had run read like a politely-worded invitation for SHIELD middle-management to go fuck themselves. He could only imagine what the ops themselves had involved. Phil's new team was a pack of highly-talented, inexperienced hell-raisers being led by someone who'd told death it could kiss his ass. He grimaced to himself. _Phil's new team_. The emotional sting was softened by the long string of requests--hard evidence that Phil was trying to get back to them--but it was still there.

Phil was miraculously alive. Phil had made a full recovery. Phil was running around doing incredibly dangerous things in a flying target with a bunch of people Clint didn't trust to back him up.

He ran his fingers through his hair and tipped his chair back. It was easy to lie to himself with the safety net of that tenth page. Easy to tell himself that he wouldn't blame Phil for holding him responsible for the attack, easy to think that he'd do the honorable thing and not try to convince Phil that it hadn't been _him_ , hadn't been anything he could stop. The attached medical reports were stomach-churning, even if the shrinks were sure Phil didn't remember most of it. 

The full recovery--and it was absolutely, without question, a full recovery; Clint didn't think his own physical would turn back such a glowing profile--hadn't been without cost. If Clint had just been a little bit faster, dodged a little bit earlier, or assessed the threat a little more quickly, Loki might have gotten an agent without a full complement of highly-classified SHIELD data to act as his personal tour-guide to the apocalypse. If Clint hadn’t been cooling his heels playing security guard for an ill-advised science experiment, the helicarrier might never have been compromised. It was a fantasy, of course; what was done was done.

But that tenth page took the danger out of it. He'd never have to test himself on it. Every thirty days, at nine AM sharp, Phil had put in a written request that, if granted, would permit him to contact them.

Natasha had been there from the time Clint had seen the casualty report. She'd been a constant voice in his ear, telling him that Phil had known, promising that Phil had understood from the start. They'd all known, and they'd been desperate to get him back. Phil had been, for him, frantic. Frantic at the thought of Clint turned into a brainwashed puppet by an enemy that had almost destroyed an entire town in ten minutes flat with an alien weapon of unbelievable firepower. Frantic at the thought of what that enemy could make him do. Frantic at the thought that they wouldn't find him, that SHIELD wouldn't be able to undo what had been done to him. Her voice had replaced Loki's for a little while, until he'd found his bearings again. The tenth page was Phil's voice added to hers, a short paragraph in bureaucratese demanding the right to come home again.

*****

Clint held the file up. Natasha's eyes flicked from his face to the folder, then back, before she nodded.

"Well?" he asked.

"Well what?"

"You know?"

"I know," she said. 

And that was that. Clint sat back against the sofa cushions, nodding gratefully. He'd been spared that much, at least. He didn’t know if he could have held himself together if he’d had to tell her.

"You know any of these names?" he asked instead.

She shrugged and settled in across from him.

"Good, bad, or ugly?" he asked with a grimace.

"May's as solid as they come. If I had to pick a shortlist of people I'd want out there with him, she'd top it. Ward likes to think he's solid, but he's..." She paused, her lips pursing. "He should have been CIA. He'd have done better there."

Clint grunted. He'd met the type before.

"The rest of them are untried, barely trained, and he'd walk through fire for them."

Clint laughed quietly. "So much for a long observation time, huh?"

"It's classic conditioning," Natasha said, her tone flattening. "That stunt with Schrodinger's Extraction Team is typical of how their missions have been parceled out. If they'd jerked him around like that and forced his hand early with us, he'd have picked us."

"Not making me feel a whole lot better about this whole thing, Nat."

She shrugged again, her shoulders rising higher this time, and gave the pillow she was leaning against a vicious jab with her elbow. "SHIELD is undermining his trust in them, but it's Coulson. He's not unaware of the problem, Clint. If push comes to shove, he'll hash it out with Fury directly."

"I need to see him, Natasha." The words slipped out, before he had time to consider them. Her eyes narrowed.

"It wasn't your fault."

"I know that." He shook his head. He did know it. But...

But he felt guilty, of course. He felt guilty for what he'd done under the tesseract's influence, and he felt even guiltier for not feeling guilty enough. For not feeling as guilty as he would have if he'd done everything voluntarily. It wasn’t his fault, but he hadn’t stopped it, and people had died. Civilians. Comrades. People he’d been supposed to protect. Men and women whose backs he should have had. It wasn’t his fault, but it wasn’t exactly not his fault, either, as far as he figured it. Natasha lifted her chin slightly, her eyes narrowing and her lips thinning. She knew the rabbit-hole his mind was going down, and she didn’t like it. He managed a smile for her, and she suppressed a sigh.

He wasn’t as bad as he could be, and they both knew it. Some of the agents Loki had taken had turned into complete wash-outs, second-guessing every thought they managed to have and loading up on psych meds to buy themselves some peace. A few of the worst cases had ended up completely reliant on a SHIELD-assigned caretaker to assure them that their impulses were harmless and the things they were experiencing were real. Some of them--the lucky ones, Clint thought--had barely needed therapy and debriefing. They'd essentially sleepwalked through the whole thing and experienced it as a vague, unpleasant hallucination, with no more visceral, self-assigned blame than would typically result from a nightmare or a bad trip. 

He'd managed to split the difference. Some of it had barely felt like someone else's doing; other things were barely recognizable through a crystalline blue haze, acts he remembered but couldn't make sense of. There were still times when he couldn't make the puzzle pieces fit. Natasha had been his rock, patiently walking him through exactly what had happened and when it had happened as many times as he needed to hear it. He couldn’t even bring himself to care if she was lying to him; her timeline had been an anchor in those first few weeks.

"I just." His hands clenched around the edge of his seat. "I just need to see him."

"This is a bad time, Clint," she warned. "You've still got eyes on you."

"It's unofficial. I can't get in trouble for accidentally ditching the team I don't know is shadowing me, can I?" He gave her a brittle smile.

"He's got eyes on him."

Clint scoffed. "Eyes that apparently couldn't find their target with a map and a flashlight, if half these debriefs are right.” His voice softened. “Look, I'll be careful."

"And if you get picked up?" she asked.

"I got a tip from an anonymous source. I checked it out. It was a good tip, and I didn't want to wake up the middle schoolers he's partying with now over a booty call."

"That's the worst cover story I've ever heard."

"That's not true," he protested. "What about the time Bobbi told that border guard that we were a mariachi band?"

Natasha did him the courtesy of pretending to consider the possibility before rejecting it. "Still not as bad as that."

“I didn’t even speak Spanish at the time.”

“Still. Not. As. Bad.”

"It's a moot point, anyway,” he said. “I'm not going to get caught."

Clint got to his feet and stalked around the room. He wouldn’t get caught. 

The teams on him were bush-league, and they weren’t exactly bringing their best game to tailing him. They were an insurance policy, a pro-forma bit of due diligence just to show any auditors or critics or territory-staking agencies that SHIELD was being careful. His part in defending Manhattan was a matter of semi-public record, and if there were any real questions about his loyalties, he wouldn’t be on active duty. 

The observation on Phil’s crew wasn’t much better. They were concerned about the probationary member that Phil had plucked off the street, and they were concerned about the team following orders to the letter. For good reason, if Phil’s “fuck you, and fuck you, and especially fuck you over there in the corner” attitude proved consistent. He imagined the cybersecurity around any of their activities was off the charts--as it should be, given their hacker’s proclivities--but nobody was worried that the team was going to go rogue and physically bust into someplace they didn’t belong with all guns blazing in direct violation of mission parameters. 

The trick would be in shaking his own shadows in a way that didn’t make them raise a flag with the crew that was watching Phil, and the very secrecy that had kept them incommunicado for so long would be working in his favor now. Any flag raised wouldn’t come directly from the eyes on him. They’d report it to their supervisors, who’d have to run it up the chain to someone with the clearance to follow a protocol instructing them to inform someone else’s supervisors, who’d hand it down to their team, who’d have to recognize him as a security threat. And that was assuming Fury had put that protocol in place instead of just being informed personally so that he could yell at them both later.

“What happens if you succeed?” Natasha asked.

“Huh?” Clint asked, shaken out of his reverie. He hadn’t bothered running the risk-assessment analysis of what happened if he succeeded.

“What happens, after you evade all possible security protocols? After you’re alone in a room with him?”

Clint’s lips twisted. They kissed. They fucked. He told Phil how sorry he was. He told Phil he was all right. Phil rattled off a list of things that hurt when the weather changed. Phil told him everything was okay. Phil told him to get the fuck out. He asked Phil to marry him. They had a beer and watched bad reality tv and never spoke of it again. He grabbed Phil and never let go. There were dozens of possibilities, and each of them was just as surreal as the one before it. A tiny, stubborn, and very vocal part of his brain refused to accept the possibility that he’d been visiting an empty grave until Phil was standing in front of him, alive and breathing.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I can’t even really get a handle on it. I mean, I’ve just been sitting here, reading this over and over again, and I want to believe it _so badly_ , but…”

“But you don’t yet,” she finished.

“Not yet.” Clint licked his lips and paused, unsure. “What I _want_ to happen is for things to go back like they used to be. Stupid, huh?”

“Very.” Natasha looked down at her hands. “How things used to be wasn’t exactly ideal.”

Clint laughed softly. It was difficult to remember when settling for a fifth of what he’d wanted just to keep that much had seemed hard. Once it had all been taken away and he’d found himself picking through the rubble Loki had left of his life, just having been able to hear Phil’s voice on the comm during a mission had suddenly turned into an idyllic time.

“Good thing I can’t have it in any case, then,” he sighed. “I just need to see him. I’ll be thinking more clearly after that. I hope.”

“He’s not your handler anymore.” Her eyes were hard as diamonds and intense as they bored into his. “He’s not your SO.”

“No.” Clint blinked. “We’re practically just coworkers at this point, aren’t we?”

“That would be my interpretation of it,” she said.

“Jesus, Nat.” He put his head in his hands. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“Does what you want seem a little clearer now?” she asked, the ghost of a smile flitting across her face.

“Yeah,” Clint muttered. “Yeah, it does.”

*****

Phil shrugged out of his jacket and hung it up in the closet, feeling a weariness that had nothing to do with physical fatigue settle behind his eyes. SHIELD was expanding. It had been before New York, and now it was happening faster. This was just a transitional phase, a reorganization. The right hand would eventually figure out what the left was doing. They'd stop being sent into bad situations with worse intel just to see what would happen. People prone to making catastrophically bad calls would have their authority to make those calls revoked. 

It didn't help matters that most of their new people were coming from sources that SHIELD had been created to be an alternative to. The institutional ossification, the paranoia, the self-destructive loyalty tests that wound up selecting more for obedient authoritarians and sociopaths than for loyalty....It was galling to see them cropping up in SHIELD when their absence was how Fury had sold him on the necessity of SHIELD in the first place. More than galling, if he was honest with himself. Enraging.

It was temporary, though. The recruits who couldn't adapt to the way SHIELD did things would be returned to their native bureaus. Fury and Hill were likely running constant assessments on who would eventually fit. In the meantime, they'd deal with the growing pains, and he'd find a way to navigate the minefield. He couldn't keep asking his specialists to trust him if he couldn't trust his orders. He couldn't keep trusting his orders if he didn't trust the chain of command. He wished he could quash the growing unease at not being able to trust the chain of command. It was difficult feeling as if his team was being set up to fail, the lives of good men and women be damned. 

It was especially difficult acknowledging that the feeling might not be an accurate assessment of the situation. He'd been denied any contact with his former social support system, an order enforced by the classification level of his continued existence. It was a move designed to make him over-identify with his new agents and invest completely in the success of their missions. It was a quick and dirty shortcut to teambuilding that, in his opinion, produced inferior results with a high likelihood of long-term breakdown. Knowing that his subjective assessment was skewed did not, however, allow him to make a better judgement. It just introduced a level of self-doubt to the equation.

He stretched and paced, shaking his head. This was exactly how the paranoid headcases at the CIA had turned into paranoid headcases. His team was...well, they had the _potential_ to be damn good. If he played his cards right and got lucky , they had the potential to be legendary. May had taken them even farther under her wing than he’d hoped she would, and they’d bonded with each other to a greater extent than their files had predicted they would be capable of. But they were raw, and they hadn’t learned to cover each other yet, and he couldn’t trust himself to make up the deficit if he didn’t trust the people handing out mission briefings. 

Phil ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. His brain was chasing itself around in circles. He needed to get some rest. He needed to decompress. He needed to ground himself, or, failing that, exhaust himself. Naturally, they'd happened to pick a motel without even the minimalist gym most places sported these days. He could either leave the premises to go for a run at midnight in a bad section of town, or he could keep pacing the room until dawn. He snorted to himself and glanced at the minibar. He supposed it couldn't hurt, as a reasonable alternative to driving himself crazy for the next few hours.


	2. Chapter 2

Clint considered the room. It was cheap and run-down; no surprise given what the outside looked like. The thin walls and thinner curtains might be a bit of a problem, though. He didn’t particularly want to be on the receiving end of sketchy, experimental weapons if one of the novices heard voices coming from the team leader’s single-occupancy room while everyone else was accounted for.

Then again, the team keeping a low profile had made it that much easier for him to dodge what little security could blend in with the surroundings. He was sure he hadn’t been seen when he’d slipped in, and apparently he hadn’t been heard, either. The water kept running, and he could pick out the odd splashes and pattering of someone showering. Assuming Phil didn’t read him the riot act, they could keep whatever happened here between them. Clint paced uneasily. 

He wanted to sit down, try to relax, and wait for Phil to get out. Or rather, he wanted to strip down and join Phil in the shower, but that was absolutely out of the question. Even just making himself at home might not be his best move, under the circumstances. It was possible Phil would be angry with him for breaking protocol. It was possible Phil would be angry with him about the role he’d played in the attack that had almost killed him. It was possible Phil wouldn’t be angry but still wouldn’t want to see him. His eyes settled on the tabletop pyramid of tiny liquor bottles, playing cards, and peanut packages, and he smiled in spite of himself. The first and only prank, if he could even call it that, that he’d ever played on Phil had been building a house of cards on top of Phil’s briefcase one time in Madripoor. He’d returned to find the whole thing sitting on the table, still intact, with the briefcase conspicuously absent. Bobbi had refused to tell him how Phil had done it.

The water stopped and was quickly followed by the rattle of curtain rings and the rustle of a towel. The bathroom door opened after another minute, and Clint swallowed at the sight of Phil, alive and solid and wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and one of Clint’s old t-shirts.

“What’s with the booze-bottle pyramid?” Clint asked casually. 

“ _Barton_?” Phil’s head snapped up, and Clint’s heart lodged in his throat. He couldn’t decipher the expression on Phil’s face, even as Phil crossed the room and stood in front of him. 

Then Phil’s mouth was on his, Phil’s hands were cupping his face, and relief flooded through him. He wrapped his arms around Phil’s chest and kissed back. Clint let himself get lost in the heat of Phil’s mouth, the feel of their tongues sliding together, the gentleness of Phil’s fingers moving over his throat and through his hair. There was a desperation to it that made him never want to loosen his hold.

Eventually Phil relaxed his hold and rocked back, and Clint found himself the subject of an intense, searching look. 

“You’re okay,” Phil said after a moment, as if he hadn’t really believed it.

“I think that’s my line,” Clint joked weakly, forcing himself not to look down at Phil’s chest. He could only imagine the scars the shirt was covering.

Phil laughed like it had become an unfamiliar thing and shook his head. “I’m better than I have any right to be. But you’re okay.”

“Same answer to that, I think.” Clint swallowed a clarification. He wasn’t fine. Some days, he was barely better than functional. But whatever Phil had been worried about, it hadn’t happened. “They didn’t tell you?”

Phil rested his forehead against Clint’s and closed his eyes, his fingers digging into Clint’s shoulders. “They told me everything.”

“You didn’t believe it,” Clint said quietly

“Trust but verify.” He leaned back and offered Clint a wan smile. “Especially if it’s exactly what you want to hear. But at least they finally cleared you for contact.” He kissed Clint again, long and deep. “That’s something. Wish they’d told me, though. I’d have ordered in, and you wouldn’t have had to rig the lock.”

Clint coughed and shifted his weight, and Phil sighed.

“They didn’t clear you, did they?” he asked, sounding resigned.

“Not exactly,” Clint hedged.

“Damn it, Clint.” There was no heat to it, though, and Clint pulled him closer and refused to let go.

“Do you care?”

“About you not landing in front of a disciplinary board? Yes. About protocol? Not really. Not right now.” The pad of Phil’s thumb was tracing the edge of his cheekbone, and Clint leaned into it. He remembered the last time he’d caught Phil looking at him like that, and the hotel room in Dallas suddenly seemed like decades ago instead of barely a year.

“We thought you were dead,” Clint said, his voice failing him.

“I got better,” Phil told him. He pressed a slow, warm kiss to Clint’s lips. “God, I just… _you’re all right_.”

The relief in Phil’s voice was palpable, and Clint melted against him. His eyes swept over the room one more time, and he rested his chin against Phil’s shoulder.

“Seriously, though, what’s up with the little liquor pyramid?”

“It’s technically a ziggurat. And I was...unfocused. One of the junior agents swears by things like that as a calming technique.”

“Does it work?” Clint asked.

“I’m feeling pretty calm right now,” Phil said, his fingertips tracing small circles on the nape of Clint’s neck. “I guess I owe her a thank-you.”

“That why you’re so relaxed about regulations all the sudden?” Clint snorted. “Guess I owe her a thank-you, too.”

“More to do with my current company.”

Clint mouthed at Phil’s throat, and Phil shivered against him. Clint eyed the bed and let his hands drop to cup Phil’s ass. He wanted to stretch Phil out on the mattress and make up for lost time, to feel his heartbeat through his skin and taste his sweat and know down to his bones that he was alive and real.

“I missed you so much,” he whispered.

“I missed you, too,” Phil told him. “I’m...sorry I didn’t contact you.”

Clint swallowed around a sudden lump in his throat and thought of the requests made every thirty days. “You had your orders.”

“Fuck my orders. I should have found a way to let you two know.”

“God, I forgot how hot it is when you talk dirty,” Clint said, holding him close. 

Phil tilted his head, his eyes searching Clint’s face and his expression opaque. After a few seconds Phil looked down and pulled away slightly.

“Really?” he asked softly.

“I’m not sure exactly what question I’m answering here, Phil.”

“All the bullshit I’ve put you through since this started, and--”

“Shh,” Clint said, kissing him quiet. “You haven’t. Or at least, no more than I’ve put you through.”

Clint’s fingers dragged over Phil’s sternum through the thin fabric of the t-shirt, and Phil shook his head sharply.

“That wasn’t you, Clint,” he said, his tone firm.

Clint let his eyes close and focused on Phil’s words. He’d missed that tone, missed that conviction that someone, at least, knew which way was up.

Phil ran his hand over Clint’s spine between his shoulder blades. “I know you. You’d never have done any of that, if you’d had a choice. I couldn’t lay that at your feet even if I wanted to.”

“If you can’t blame me for getting you stabbed, I can’t exactly blame you for making sure I didn’t get taken advantage of, can I?” Clint chided gently.

“I’m the one who would have been taking advantage,” Phil reminded him.

“You’re not my boss anymore,” Clint said, relaxing against him. “I mean, it’d look pretty stupid having to go get my expense reports and equipment requisitions signed off on by a dead guy.”

Phil laughed softly, almost under his breath. Clint’s chest tightened at the sound, and god, he’d forgotten how lost he could get without this.

“I have missed you so much, Clint.” Phil’s voice was thick, and Clint’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d dreamed of something exactly like this. Phil, solid and responsive in his arms, the smell of Phil’s skin in his nose, the give of Phil’s body under his fingers. Phil _alive_ , and everything he thought he’d lost forever right in front of him with one last chance to make things right.

“Would it spoil the mood if I said I wanted to make you come until you can’t see straight?” Clint mumbled into Phil’s shoulder.

His answer was Phil laughing, low and hard enough to make his chest vibrate against Clint’s ribs.

*****

Clint closed his eyes and tried not to come too quickly. It was a difficult thing, between Phil’s breath on his neck and the small, encouraging noises Phil was making almost in his ear with every thrust and the way Phil’s legs were wrapped around his waist and the pulse of Phil’s flesh around his cock with every subtle shift of position. He’d always imagined it being good with Phil. He could never have imagined the way Phil would sound when Clint had slid in, burying himself in him up to the hilt, with Phil holding him so close he could barely start thrusting. It had been a fight, sometimes, to make Phil lose control before. This time, here, Phil had been willing to lower his defenses almost completely, and Clint wanted it to last as long as he could make it.

“God, Clint,” Phil groaned, his fingers digging into Clint’s back. His whole body tightened a moment later, and Clint felt a warm gush against his belly.

Clint gave up on whatever thoughts he’d had of holding on just a bit longer and let himself come. He managed one last, firm thrust before his spine stiffened and his nerves lit up and he was sure he’d never have to let Phil go.

Eventually reality set back in, and it occurred to Clint that they should probably get cleaned up before they fell asleep. He eased out of Phil and threw the condom away, then turned back to ask if Phil wanted the shower. He stopped before he even started, his heart caught by the sight of Phil sprawled out on the bed, Clint’s shirt sticking to his skin from their mingled sweat and Phil’s own come, a lazy and satisfied smile on his face.

“Hey,” he managed, and Phil snorted.

“Hey, yourself.”

“Do you want the shower first?” Clint asked, trying to memorize how Phil looked in that moment. 

He was sure-- _positive_ \--that Phil would want to do this again, but the part of Clint’s brain that had forgotten what optimism felt like was busy calculating the odds of them being off a mission at the same time in the same area and being able to slip their supervisors for a long enough time. He needed something to remind himself that it was real, that this had happened, until then.

“Yeah, that might be a good idea,” Phil laughed quietly, looking down at the mess he’d made of the t-shirt. He stretched, got to his feet, and grabbed a change of clothes from his bag before padding into the bathroom.

Phil closed the door behind him and waited while the water warmed up, his eyes heavy-lidded and his skin electric and tingling. He peeled the shirt off and tossed it onto the counter, ignoring the red knot of scar tissue in the mirror. Clint hadn’t pressed the issue when Phil had stopped him from pulling the shirt off with the same eager surety with which he’d stripped off Phil’s boxers. He’d seemed almost grateful to avoid that landmine for now. 

They’d have to deal with it some day, but Phil couldn’t bring himself to regret putting it off until then. Clint had given him a second chance. Clint had _happily_ given him a second chance, after the unbelievable mess he’d made of the first. He eased under the spray and scrubbed the sex off his skin, too impatient to get back in bed to do more than a perfunctory job.

Phil still couldn’t quite believe it. Clint, free and healthy and himself again. Clint, here with him now. Clint, who had every reason in the world to be angry with him, to resent him, to blame him for what happened, sweeping it all aside like it was nothing. Clint, still wanting him badly enough to take everything on offer without thinking twice.

Phil killed the water and toweled off quickly, then pulled on the clean clothes. His hand lingered on his chest, the scar feeling warmer than the rest of his skin even through the thin cotton of his undershirt. He shook himself. They’d deal with it later. He opened the door to find Clint half wrapped in the blanket and snoring softly into his pillow. Phil leaned against the doorjamb for a few minutes, just watching him. He was here, and this was real. Clint was as gorgeous as he’d ever been, and he was relaxed and dozing peacefully in Phil’s bed. Maybe there were a few more lines that sleep couldn’t completely erase, but that was just extra assurance that Phil wasn’t dreaming this. Maybe it would be another year before they could do this again, but Phil would take what he could get.

Clint stirred and blinked at him. 

“You coming to bed at some point, or are you just going to stare at me with that dopey smile on your face all night?” he asked. “It’s all the same to me, because you have the cutest dopey smile I’ve ever seen, but I’m taking the center if you’re not going to use the other half.”

Phil flushed and hit the light, and Clint shivered a little when he climbed back into bed. Clint rolled over so that they were face to face and threw his arm over Phil’s waist.

“So, this is going to sound kind of insane,” he said.

Phil frowned. There was an undercurrent of worry that hadn’t been there earlier, and he reached up to stroke Clint’s jaw.

“But, um, I love you.”

Phil inched closer and kissed him. “I love you, too, Clint. I should have told you before.”

“Oh, thank god. I was worried I was going to come off like a stalker.” Clint sagged against him and kissed him back fiercely. “Or scare you off.”

“You couldn’t, Clint.”

“I did, though,” Clint reminded him.

“You didn’t,” Phil sighed. “It was me. I was so afraid that I’d hurt you, or get you hurt. I wanted too much, and I loved you, and I wanted to protect you. And look how that turned out.” He laughed bitterly. “I was being an idiot. I love you, and I should have told you.”

“I’m going to have to go on record here as not objecting to any of that,” Clint said quickly. “In fact, if you want to love me a really ridiculous amount, that’s fine with me. I’ll actually go ahead and sign something to that effect and file it with Fury, if it would make you more comfortable.”

“Please don’t do that,” Phil snorted.

“I’m just saying. I would if you wanted me to.”

“I’ll keep that in mind if I ever want to make Nick deeply regret not letting HR have higher clearance,” Phil promised.

Clint grinned. He could almost forget how it felt to hear Natasha tell him that Phil hadn’t made it, here and now and like this. “I love you. I love you, I love you, _I love you_. You know, I never thought I was going to get to tell you that? I love you.”

“Mmm.” Phil pressed against him. “I love you, too.”

“I could listen to you say that for hours,” Clint murmured.

Phil brushed his lips over Clint’s forehead. “Maybe next time. I’ve only got five hours until wheels-up.”

“I could come with you. Nobody’d have to know.”

“I couldn’t sneak a bag of pretzels past Melinda, never mind an extra crew member. You’re going to have to wait until the next time we get a day off,” Phil sighed, squeezing him tighter. “God, Clint. I’ve missed you so damn much.”

Clint squirmed against him and was glad the light was too dim for Phil to see him blush. He was already hard again, and he knew Phil could feel his cock sliding against his belly. Phil kissed him, his tongue sliding into Clint’s mouth, and Clint kneaded his ass.

“I don’t suppose you’re up for another round?” Clint asked hopefully. “I mean, we’re probably not going to get to do this again for a brutally long time, and I’m pretty sure I can last more than ten seconds this time, even though you were just like ‘I love you, let’s adopt a kid and buy a house and be stupidly happy for the rest of our lives’ at me.”

Phil paused. “Are you just saying that to provide extra incentive to get myself declared not-dead?”

“No, but I guess you’re going to have to at some point,” Clint reasoned. “People the government say are dead get really terrible credit scores, and I don’t want to still be paying off a mortgage when I’m a grandfather.”

Phil chuckled and kissed him again. There was something about Clint talking about a future together that made his heart beat faster. It was foolish, and they both knew better. He wasn’t even sure if the things Clint was saying were things that Clint really wanted. But it was safe to pretend for a few hours that any plans they might make could be kept.

“I don’t have another condom,” he confessed.

“Um.” Clint bit his lip. “Do we _need_ one? They’ve been making me go to the doctor for a thorough work-up every three weeks since New York went down, and nothing’s turned up. And I’ve kind of been having a Sahara-sized dry-spell since we broke it off, so if anything communicable was going to pop up, I think it would have. Obviously, if you don’t want to without, that’s fine, we’ll do something else, but.”

“But?”

“But I think they’d have picked up on it if you had so much as a cold,” Clint finished.

Phil sucked at his throat. “Are you sure?”

“I was sure before you started doing that, and now I don’t know what I’ll do if you say no,” Clint panted, bucking against him. “Probably embarrass the hell out of myself and the night-clerk at the closest pharmacy.”

“I think we’re okay,” Phil said. He peeled off his boxers and nipped at Clint’s bottom lip.

“Oh, thank god,” Clint said, rolling them so that he was on top of Phil. He braced himself so that he wasn’t resting too much weight on Phil’s chest and grinned at him. He could see the lust on Phil’s face in the dim glow from the window, and his cock throbbed again in response. “Where did the lube wind up?”

“Back in the drawer there. In the nightstand.” 

Phil extracted his arm from the tangle of covers and groped for the bottle. A brief rattle and thump later, and then Clint felt Phil’s slick hand working his cock. He let out a low groan and let his head rest on Phil’s collarbone for a moment. Phil dragged him back up for a kiss, and Clint’s cock jumped in Phil’s hand as their tongues tangled. He hooked one hand behind Phil’s knee and stretched him out, and Phil arched up to meet him. When he lined himself up and pressed in slowly, carefully, giving Phil time to relax around him, it was just slightly more, slightly _better_ than it had been before. Probably, he thought, because he wasn’t tripping over himself to give Phil everything he needed all at once. Probably because Phil had been saying “I love you” just moments before. He pushed Phil’s knee against the mattress and adjusted his angle, and Phil writhed under him.

“Jesus, Clint!” Phil hissed, groaning.

“You like that?” Clint asked. He wished they’d left the lights on. Phil’s hands were digging into him, and he was tight around Clint’s cock, and he sounded like he was already on the edge of coming again.

“Just fuck me, please, I need you--” The rest of it was lost in a sharp intake of breath when Clint began to thrust.

Clint thought Phil might actually leave bruises this time, and he couldn’t bring himself to mind. They’d last. He’d be able to see them in the mirror and think about Phil clinging to him and moaning, remember the hot clench of Phil’s flesh around him, recall the give of Phil’s body under his hands. Phil was gasping and shaking by the time Clint knew he’d hit the point of no return, and he shifted position in the hopes that he could bring Phil with him.

“Come on, Phil, just for me,” he begged.

Phil groaned and twisted under him as Clint spilled inside him. Clint collapsed slowly, pulling Phil onto his side so that he wouldn’t have to lose an inch of contact just yet. Phil shivered against him as he caught his breath.

“You still with me?” Clint asked quietly, running his tongue over Phil’s earlobe.

“I think I might have grabbed a live wire by mistake,” Phil mumbled. “That was just…”

“Really good? Epic? Top ten experiences of your life?”

“Amazing,” Phil finished, “except that I’m never going to make it back to the shower.”

“Housekeeping will probably forgive us if you leave them a huge tip.”

Phil tugged the blankets over them and cradled Clint until they fell asleep.

*****

Clint was halfway out the window when he heard the shutter noise of a cell phone camera. He swore to himself, dropped the rest of the way to the ground, and turned around.

“Skye, I presume?” he asked, trying to sound less sheepish than he felt. If he was going to get busted, he’d assumed it would have been May. At least, he thought, it hadn’t been the geek squad.

“Agent Barton.” The girl was doing a reasonable job of keeping the smirk off her face, which Clint appreciated.

“Coulson’s shared some war stories?” he sighed ruefully.

“Uh, not as such, no.” The smirk was past suppressing now, and she covered it with her hand instead. “More like Coulson’s surreptitiously checking up on you enough that I couldn’t _not_ take a peek.”

“Seems like a bit of a leap,” Clint pointed out. “My money says he checks up on everybody.”

Skye wedged herself further into the shadows thrown by the halogens and shook her head. “Your files got reviewed five-point-eight times more than anyone else’s. Definite access spike where your data was concerned.”

“I see.” He crossed his arms and tried to forget that she had a photo of his ass hanging out Coulson’s window on her phone. “And you’re monitoring what he’s accessing because…?”

“I’m concerned. And he never _talks_ about anything,” she said defensively. “Unless yelling at someone on satellite-phone through doors that aren’t as sound-proofed as he thinks they are is how SHIELD super-spies talk about things?”

“Um. Kind of, yeah.”

“Oh. I guess he’s great at talking, then, and everyone in this entire organization needs therapy,” Skye grunted. “If you know my name, I can only guess you’ve been checking up on him, too. So you know, it’s what I do.” She made a little jazz-hands gesture. “Ta-da.”

“So why am I discussing Coulson with a ten-year-old in this zipcode’s second-sleaziest parking lot at four in the morning, exactly?” Clint asked.

“Because if I got May or Ward out of bed, they’d hit you with a baton. And if I got Fitz-Simmons out of bed, they’d shoot you with some less-than-lethal- _in-theory_ weapon. And either way, we’d all be in crazy amounts of trouble, because Coulson really likes you. Like, really-really likes you. Whereas if I handle this myself, we get to talk like normal people about how if you do something super-douchey and break his heart, your butt is going to mysteriously wind up set as the wallpaper on Director Fury’s laptop.”

Clint leaned back against the wall and looked at her for a moment, and she cleared her throat.

“And just so we’re clear, all my stuff’s set on a dead-man switch, so if anything terrible happens, uh. You know how dead-man switches work.”

Clint rolled his eyes. Phil’s team might be rough around the edges, but he was suddenly a little less worried about trusting them with Phil’s safety. He grinned at her.

“Tell you what, kid. We’ll forget this entire conversation happened, on the condition that my butt winds up as the wallpaper on Coulson’s laptop.”


End file.
